Category Archives: WordPress

The open source publishing platform I co-founded — development, releases, community, and the ecosystem.

Five items:

WordPress, AI, plugins, future of software engineering

AI, Open Source, WordPress

Yesterday I was on the WP-Tonic podcast, and my colleague Adrian Laboş did a great summary of the key points, which I’ll share here:

AI security audit wave incoming: Expect AI tools to flood WordPress core and the 70,000+ plugin ecosystem with both improvements and newly discovered security vulnerabilities, requiring infrastructure to triage at scale.

Avoid vibe-coding compliance surfaces: For payments, fraud, and regulated commerce flows, prioritize battle-tested WooCommerce and vetted extensions over bespoke AI-generated code.

Reposition plugins around durable differentiation: If AI collapses “nice-to-have” features (e.g., basic image manipulation), shift value to workflow ownership, integrations, compliance, performance, and support.

Agencies gain leverage, not obsolescence: AI tools give motivated technical people 10-100x capability increases, meaning agencies can serve existing clients far better rather than being replaced by DIY site builders.

Sell outcomes, not hours, as an agency: Client expectations will compress delivery timelines; adapt pricing to value-based packaging and use AI internally to raise throughput and QA coverage.

Design for agentic usability: Strengthen APIs, WP-CLI, and machine-friendly interfaces so personal agents can safely operate WordPress tasks without brittle UI automation.

WordPress Playground enables AI verification: Spinning up fully containerized WordPress instances in 20-45 seconds inside browsers allows AI to test code across 20+ environments simultaneously, fundamentally changing plugin compatibility testing.

Benchmark AI outputs against WordPress-specific evals: Adopt WordPress block, plugin, and site-generation evaluations to catch “small file” failures (readme, headers, packaging) that break deployments.

Prioritize compatibility testing by real-world co-install patterns: Reduce factorial plugin-combination risk by sampling tests based on which plugins are commonly used together and automating those paths.

Plugin directory needs editorial curation: With submissions accelerating toward 100,000+ plugins, WordPress will introduce editorial spotlights on newer plugins with excellent code/design to balance discoverability with marketplace openness.

Improve plugin discoverability without freezing innovation: Curate “trusted” and “high quality” signals while preserving pathways for new entrants to earn distribution through measurable excellence.

Plan for uneven economic diffusion: Even with today’s models, enterprise adoption lags consumer usage; build internal enablement and governance now so teams can scale impact as tooling matures.

Learning to learn beats domain expertise: When advising students/parents, the most future-proof skills are curiosity-driven learning, command of language, and study of classics/philosophy/ethics rather than specific technical domains.

WordPress 7.0 promises AI integration: The upcoming release will feature “lots of fun AI stuff” and represents one of the most exciting technology years in Matt’s career since starting in the industry.

I had no idea that today Anthropic would release their security thing that does exactly what I said.

The best thing you’ll read about AI engineering today is Chris Lattner’s take on Claude’s C compiler implementation. To steal Techmeme’s headline: “Claude’s C Compiler shows AI elevates the role of human judgment and vision; it’s a milestone, but closely mirrors LLVM/GCC, and hard codes things to pass tests.” The entire post is important, but this paragraph is particuluarly profound:

As writing code is becoming easier, designing software becomes more important than ever. As custom software becomes cheaper to create, the real challenge becomes choosing the right problems and managing the resulting complexity. I also see big open questions about who is going to maintain all this software.

To bring this back to WordPress: While I was in another meeting today, Claude Code with Opus 4.6 completed a cleanroom implementation of the ACF plugin in about 45 minutes. It was about to go off and implement all the pro features, but I stopped it because it would be a tremendous waste of tokens. The entire point of open source is collaborating on a shared goal rather than reinventing the wheel every time.

We’ve seen a slow version of this play out over the past decade, where every single web host that offers WordPress also spun up some sort of proprietary website or ecommerce builder. Bless their hearts. None has caused Shopify any lost nights of sleep. With countless person-years of development and who knows how many tens or hundreds of millions of dollars spent, I think we can now safely say that all of these efforts have had at most a marginal impact on their businesses, while the benefits of WordPress have continued to compound.

The thought experiment of whether those same resources had been used to make WordPress better is left as an exercise for the reader.

It does mean that competition is fiercer. You have to differentiate yourself on performance, customer service, reliability, design—things that are hard, but that’s capitalism.

It’s really important that in the plugin directory, we figure out how to make it easier for people to collaborate and build things together, rather than make a thousand versions of the same thing.

Two interesting posts today, first is Nick Hamze, who ponders the case on his delightfully avant-garde site for how WordPress fits in when everything is coded up on a whim, Nobody Rips Out the Plumbing.

Separately, I was delighted to see that legendary investor Brad Feld has hooked up Claude Code to post to his WordPress site, which hammers in Nick’s point that when you can use these tools on top of existing infrastructure, you get a much stronger foundation than imagining everything from scratch.

One of the great WordPress blogs is Quote Investigator. In their investigation into the original source of “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter,” I came across this great variation from Woodrow Wilson on the amount of time he spent preparing speeches.

“That depends on the length of the speech,” answered the President. “If it is a ten-minute speech it takes me all of two weeks to prepare it; if it is a half-hour speech it takes me a week; if I can talk as long as I want to it requires no preparation at all. I am ready now.”

So true.

Matt 4.2

Audrey, Birthday, WordPress

It’s that time of the year again for a new version release. Forty-two is a fun number, of course, famous from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

I’m in Miami, where I’m attending a conference by Richard Saul Wurman. I decided that it would be a great way to fill my brain on my birthday. Since New Year’s, I’ve been in warm climates and had lots of dips in the ocean. Had a small birthday dinner a few days ago and my friends surprised me with a beautiful “HappyBdayMattic” cake.

This last year was particularly challenging, especially at the beginning. However, it just kept getting better, and particularly WordCamp US in August was inspiring. The warmth and support of the WordPress community pulled me out of the funk I had been in. It was also when I kicked off the habit of daily blogging, which led to 2025 being the highest number of words (34.7k) I’ve posted since 2004! I traveled 209k miles, about a third lower than last year, spending longer stretches in 45 cities and 16 countries.

One of my biggest lessons of the year was learning how to ask for help. I’m usually the person others come to, and I carry a lot of responsibility on my shoulders from my friends and loved ones, and for the companies and communities I’m lucky enough to be part of. I’ve had some bad experiences asking for help in the past, as well. Now, how I see it is that it might not always work, but if you don’t ask for help, you also don’t give people the chance to step up. This year, the support of several friends got me through some really tough spots.

A joy of this year was seeing my godchildren grow up, close friends starting families, and the Audrey Scholars program. There’s a Walt Disney quote I just found out about that I love: “I do not make films primarily for children. I make them for the child in all of us, whether we be six or sixty.” Kids can’t help but remind you how important it is to maintain that childlike sense of curiosity.

A random new thing I’ve adopted this year is coconut water. I’ve been trying to hydrate with electrolytes, especially first thing in the morning, and it’s a great natural source of minerals.

My main goals this year are to keep up daily writing, post some of my archive photos, finally visit Rome and bring my family, swim more, and be the best leader for Automattic and the WordPress community through the incredible changes and opportunities of the AI era.

Even though I have several decades of history now, I find myself looking forward far more than back. Great words to live by I just learned from Jeffrey Katzenberg, apparently originally from Doug Ivester.

Never let your memories be greater than your dreams.

That said, it is a funny time to revisit my original version-number birthday post, 2.2, which is exactly 20 years old now.

I wish everyone a wonderful 2026!

All birthday posts: 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42.

Wolfram Automattica

Automattic, Podcast, WordPress

It’s exciting to announce that Stephen Wolfram has joined as a special advisor to Automattic.

I promise this is not just because he is such an incredible blogger, using WordPress, natch.

If you don’t know about Stephen Wolfram, his about page is not a bad place to start, but far more interesting is his 2019 essay on Seeking the Productive Life, which includes a setup for hiking outdoors while typing on a laptop.

Stephen was doing the remote CEO thing decades before I imagined Automattic. He spoke at Automattic’s Grand Meetup in 2019 and one of my favorite memories was seeing him at the silent disco after-party. We also did an episode of the Distributed podcast together.

Since he started engaging more deeply earlier this year, I’ve gotten a lot of joy from seeing him interact with teams across the company, asking questions in an incisive, inquisitive way that helps break down problems. We just finished up several hours of a deep dive into our board topics with several hundred Automatticans participating.

Automattic has been blessed with amazing directors over the years. Currently, our board is Susan Decker, General Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider, and me.

Apple iWeb

Video, WordPress

The new X/Twitter algorithim is hard to predict, but I’ve had one go viral with over a million views now, a quote-tweet of a cool demo video of Apple’s website builder from 2009, with themes and blog support and everything. Interesting to compare its interface to Gutenberg and WordPress today.

For the video to play on the webpage, you have to visit in Safari.

The colors here have now gone blue for winter, and snow has started, thanks to the excellent Snow Fall plugin. I also wanted to congratulate Wealthfront on their IPO. Many on their team have been friends or advisors over the years, from David Fortunato responding to my email about their WordPress blog being on an old version when they launched, to the amazing Adam Nash who teaches CS 007 Personal Finance for Engineers at Stanford, and he now runs the awesome Daffy donor-advised tax fund startup. I was an early customer, and even on their homepage as a testimonial in 2011, Audrey Capital has been an investor since 2013 and if you sign up with this link we both get 5k extra managed for free.

SoTW Eve

Events, WordPress

The State of the Word is tomorrow, and it’s so fun to see SF abuzz with WordPress open source energy. We’re doing a lot of firsts tomorrow, including the first release timed to the State of the Word, and we’ll have a good chunk of the release team there to push the button and bring WordPress 6.9 to the world.

We’ll also be crossing streams with another community: in the last ten minutes, we’ll join TBPN, the new must-watch daily tech show.

The art and activations are looking so good; it’s fun to see how everything evolves. Tokyo was so beautiful last year; I wasn’t sure how we’d top it, but the creativity of everyone coming together has sparked something new this year that I think is quite cool. We’re trying to honor our mission of democratizing publishing, making things that are powerful and capable, but also retain the flicker of art.

We’re also opening up TinkerTendo to the community. I was just there with a few dozen of the crew, and the vibes are so fun. If you’re in SF, definitely swing by and connect with the folks building the most open internet we can all enjoy.

Check out the livestream tomorrow, it’ll be a nice capstone to all we’ve built together this year.

SF WordPress Party

Events, WordPress

We’ve secured an amazing secret venue for State of the Word on Tuesday, but it has limited capacity in terms of people and has a lot of security hurdles to jump through to get in.

So to open things up to the community more, we’re going to activate my hacker/maker art warehouse, TinkerTendo, in the Dogpatch neighbourhood for a simulcast watch party. There will be some cool art from the Misalignment Museum there, great wifi, lots of power plugs and floor seating, a big projection screen and speakers and I think will be a great spot for WordPress folks to hang and network and co-work while in San Francisco. I’ll swing by after the talk to meet everyone as well.

If you want access, you can register via Meetup here.

Rothko Chapel Garden

Personal, WordPress

It’s been hard for me to write about Friday because it was so overwhelming, to see so many friends and loved ones and teachers and mentors there, including friends of my late Father’s I hadn’t seen in years, and to be with all of the people who have been driving the mission of the Rothko Chapel over decades, and gosh. There were literally monarchs and dragonflies (my Mom’s favorite) flitting about as each person spoke. Although the Houston heat beat down upon us on an unseasonably warm November day, you couldn’t have imagined a more perfect scene.

Speaking before me were Troy Porter (Board Chair), Abdullah Antepli (the new director), Christopher Rothko, Abbie Kamin (City Council member), Adam Yarinsky (architect), Lanie McKinnon (landscape architect), and my sister, Charleen. Here is what I offered to the proceeding:

I can’t believe we’re all here; it’s been so long coming to this point.

So I should start by saying that part of the reason I started blogging and WordPress is I have a terrible memory, I forget everything.

But as I remember it, my conscious relationship to the chapel begins in my teenage years, when exploring the city with some friends from the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, some of whom are here today. We were always bumming around the area. HSPVA at the time was in Montrose, and we bummed around the Saint Thomas campus and the related parks and stumbled across the Rothko Chapel.

I was totally taken aback, and couldn’t wait to call up my parents about what I had discovered. “Mom! Look what I found!“

She just started laughing.

Of course, I hadn’t discovered it; it turns out that almost a decade before, she had brought me there as a small child. Apparently, we had been playing in Bell Park, and rain clouds started to form, so she was looking for someplace we could go inside, and the Rothko Chapel was, of course, open.

I’ve been to the Chapel countless times now. I’ve been when I’m grieving, I’ve been when I’m celebrating, I’ve been when I needed a reset, I’ve brought friends that loved it, that hated it, that cried, I’ve brought friends that laughed.

Some of my favorites when I was training for a half-marathon and would run here, take a quick meditation break, and then run back home

There’s a milion stories about how people come to the chapel, and many more about how they leave it, it’s a nexus or Schelling point. Whatever your experience, you’ll always remember it and leave changed.

I’m so glad to be able to celebrate this opening with all of you. Here are of course my family that raised me, but also friends and teachers that shaped me as a man and without which I wouldn’t have been able to accomplish anything I have in my life. I see some teachers here, I see Doc Morgan, David Caceres. Thank you so much for being here.

My father, Chuck Mullenweg, passed in 2016, but Mom, I know he would have loved this. Christopher, thank you for the opportunity to contribute in a small way to our shared mission of honoring our fathers’ legacy.

My mother, Kathleen Mullenweg, is right here, I hope you get a chance to meet her. A garden seemed very fitting as her lifelong green thumb and love of gardening has always been grounding and inspiring to me. Mom, I just wanted to take this opportunity to say thank you again for being the best mother a boy could hope for, and giving me such a broad extracurricular education, especially in the arts.

I work in technology, which has already transformed society and is poised to do even more with the age of AI beginning, and I believe it is incredibly important for technologists building the future to be connected and informed by the arts, because we need our software to have soul.

What I hope for most, though, is that the peace and reflection garden and birch grove bring some mother and child someday, who perhaps wander into the chapel looking to escape rain, and that kid later goes back to his mother a decade later and says, Look what I found!

Bending Spoons

The story of what Bending Spoons has built is very impressive, and I’m a customer of theirs through Evernote, WordPress uses Meetup a ton. I think Automattic’s Noho office used to belong to Meetup. They’ve built an incredible engineering and product culture that can terraform technology stacks into something much more efficient. I think their acquisitions of Vimeo and AOL are brilliant. This interview with Luca Ferrari on Invest Like The Best goes into their story and unique culture. I also always love a good Matrix reference. 🙂

Mia Elvasia has a great article about how they realized they were spending $635/yr across various plugins to get things that Jetpack offered bundled and often free. Save money!

Jetpack is frequently overlooked as one of the most underappreciated plugins in the WordPress universe. This is partially our fault, as the article notes, because the UI for some of these settings is quite poor. We’re working on it! If you can tolerate a bit of UI clunkiness, there’s significant value to be gained from Jetpack right now. For everyone else, we’ll make it much more intuitive soon.

Grokipedia

Open Source, Review, Tech, Wikipedia, WordPress

It’s very interesting to compare my Wikipedia article and my Grokipedia article. The Grokipedia version is much, much longer, and does a better job of listing my accomplishments versus some random recent controversy. (Will someone reading about me a hundred years from now care that WordPress briefly had a sustainability team as one of its dozens of teams?) But at least everything on Wikipedia is true! On Grokipedia:

WooCommerce, an open-source e-commerce platform integrated with WordPress, enables online stores and has facilitated over $1 trillion in annual commerce as of 2023.

While I actually believe someday, probably around 2037, Woo will facilitate a trillion in commerce annually, that number is off by a couple orders of magnitude right now. 🙂

As with all software, we shouldn’t come to conclusions based on the 1.0 but rather look to its vector and speed of iteration, so I’ll reserve judgment on Grokipedia for now.

I love Wikipedia. I’ve been a contributor since it started, and I think it embodies Open Source ideals in a really beautiful way. For a little love letter to Wikipedia check out this article by Jason Koebler, Grokipedia Is the Antithesis of Everything That Makes Wikipedia Good, Useful, and Human. My take: If you think there’s something wrong with the Wikipedia, the way to fix it is to get involved and contribute. They have a robust community.

As a bonus, I learned today that the Wikimedia Foundation runs on WordPress! What an honor.